The Problem with Streaming's Solution

We wanted to be free from schedules and cable packages. The solution isn't much better.

The New York Times has a long piece talking with both Hollywood veterans and disruptors about what the future of streaming will look like. While it’s a bit grating to see guys who get paid millions of dollars to run these media empires have as much clairvoyance as anyone vaguely familiar with the streaming landscape, at least there’s some honesty about the uncertainty facing the entire industry.

There are times when it would seem nice to wave a magic wand and return to the 2000s when Netflix only did DVD-by-mail and we had ad-supported cable with some premium tiers, we have to acknowledge that streaming solved a lot of problems people had with that system. The ability to simply stream a movie at a flat monthly rate was enticing, and when original programming came along, the audience was no longer bound by scheduling. DVRs like TiVo had helped usher in time-shifting for cable, but audiences wanted more of that liberation to both reclaim their time and have the ease browsing of a streaming platform. It’s not so surprising that other media companies rushed in to try and make their own streaming platforms since audiences soured on network and cable television.

So I can sympathize with this uncharted landscape where the answer now seems to be, “Make it ad-supported cable but without timeslots.” But whereas cable offered different channels largely aligned to particular types of programming and demographics, streaming still struggles with basic organizational principles. Disney+ tried to craft itself around brands like Marvel and Star Wars, but that’s not going to work anymore, so you have Hulu integrated into Disney+ where you have The Bear side-by-side with The Lion King and only a couple of slots away from Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown. If you saw those lined up next to each other for a night of television, you’d think the programmer had lost their mind.

The other platforms behave the same way. Only a niche streamer like Criterion, Shudder, or Crunchyroll, which have distinct lineups (arthouse/indie, horror, and anime, respectively) seem to have their programming under control, but they also are well aware they’ll never be the biggest streamer on the block. To be a titan of streaming, you have to offer all kinds of things to all kinds of audiences and hope that the algorithm directs people in a reasonable direction (although more often than not, the “Top Picks for You” are simply what Netflix wants to push regardless of your viewing history, which is why I’ve got Your Honor and Bridgerton in my recommendations, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re also currently in Netflix’s Top 10 TV Shows).

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

What these executives are missing isn’t simply a matter of content, subscriber numbers, price points, bundling, and licensing, although all of those are important. The problem is how any viewer is supposed to make sense of it all outside the most expensive material on the platform. I’m not surprised that when I open Max it’s pushing House of the Dragon at me. Game of Thrones was a monster hit, and its prequel series is both expensive to make and has a built-in audience. But what about everything else on Max? What’s the infrastructure that helps the viewer?

These high-powered executives continue to miss the shape of the thing. To be fair, the technology is as new to them as it is to just about everyone else, but they seem to think the only way to retain viewers is with content or proper bundling. Those are certainly tools in the toolkit, but they’re missing easier ones like the ability to give users a way to organize their lists, prioritize genres, actors, etc. Amazon owns IMDb, and I use the same account to log in to both services. Yet at no point has Amazon ever considered, “Hey, you have an IMDb Watchlist; allow us to populate that watchlist with available titles on Prime Video.” Instead, they spent $300 million on six episodes of the original series Citadel, a show no one watched.

I get that in Hollywood, you want to be splashy. You want the highest concept and the biggest stars, which is why Amazon spent who knows how much on whatever this is supposed to be. But at some point, you may want to sit down with your UI/UX team and think about how to introduce a little order to the chaos of your streaming platform. Ask your users not simply what kind of shows they want to see, but how they wish they could access them more easily. Try to find the proper balance between promoting new movies and shows and allowing more control over how your viewers access your entire library. One of the reasons streaming was more appealing than cable was because it empowered viewers over what they were watching. Burying them in an avalanche of unrelated shows and movies is the opposite of that.

Recommendations

When you see the term “A.I.” anywhere these days, you should think of it more as “machine learning,” or “LLM” (Language Learning Model). As Dave Karpf explains, what we’re seeing is an iterative technology being billed as revolutionary. Furthermore, even on an iterative scale, it’s not clear if this is the massive improvement Silicon Valley promises. More importantly, we need to immediately recognize that “Powered by A.I.” or anything along those lines is simply marketing-speak. Look at how much “A.I.” has been added to various websites and apps, and all you’ll see is a chatbot that sometimes has the right answer. If I knew how to short the A.I. market I would because that bubble is primed to pop.

What's in a name? "AI" versus "Machine Learning"

No specific recommendations on the Blu-ray/4K side today, but I will note that Barnes & Noble’s biannual 50% off Criterion sale is expected to start on Friday, so if there’s anything you’ve been looking to snatch up from the collection, wait until then. For my part, I have my eye on the 4Ks of To Die For, The Last Picture Show, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

What I’m Watching

Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) in Janet Planet | Image via A24

There are some new indies in theaters, but neither one really blew me away. The better of the two is Janet Planet, which is set in Western Massachusetts during the summer of 1991 and follows 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) and her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson). The film is largely from Lacy’s perspective as she watches other adults come in and out of Janet’s orbit, but the film also functions as an awakening of sorts for both Janet and Lacy as they come to realize they can’t be the center of each other’s universes anymore. It’s a story about seeing more of your parent’s humanity and also realizing your shortcomings as a parent. Writer-director Annie Baker does a strong job directing her debut feature, but the movie never entirely clicked for me. That being said, I’ve read reviews from people who liked the movie, and they love it so strongly that it sounds like it will be in their Top 10 of the year.

The other indie is Daddio, which is the feature debut of writer-director Christy Hall. Dakota Johnson plays a young woman driving into the city from JFK who has an intimate and personal conversation with her cab driver, played by Sean Penn. Both Johnson and Penn feel strongly about the project with Johnson plugging it rather than Madame Web (can you blame her?) and Penn giving a rare interview to promote the movie. Watching the film, it’s not difficult to see why the actors are so up on the movie since the film rests entirely on their performances and almost everything is in close-up because they’re in a cab. This is an actor’s movie, but the story felt a little bland and the profundity of the connection between the two characters came off as forced. I was hoping for something along the lines of Locke, but Daddio plays as lukewarm.

What I’m Reading

I finished reading My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, and I was kind of let down by it after it received so much acclaim. It has the facilimile of a memoir and it’s clear that author Emil Ferris has some commonalities with protagonist Karen Reyes, but the book feels like it’s loading on so much in an attempt to be emotionally fraught without really having enough clarity on the story it seeks to tell. There’s the mysterious death of Karen’s upstairs neighbor who was also a Holocaust survivor and had been sex-trafficked as a child in pre-war Germany. However, there’s also Karen’s story about an adolescent girl discovering her burgeoning homosexuality, that her beloved older brother may be responsible for the neighbor’s death but also may be responsible for another mysterious death, and their mother is dying of cancer. Ferris approaches all of this with a sketchbook style drawn on loose-leaf paper and wants to cover everything from the banalities of Reyes’ neighborhood to the glorious heights of the art hanging in 1960s Chicago museums. I admire the book’s ambition, but I also think it collapses under its weight.

What I’m Hearing

There’s a new episode of Maintenance Phase that delves into the panic about “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysmorphia,” a thing that doesn’t exist, and no one has come close to proving its existence. The narrative is that teenagers, in an attempt to fit in with their peers, become trans, go to the doctor, immediately get puberty blockers, and then irreversible surgery. It’s a myth, and any government action on it would be like passing a bill saying all amputees must be constantly surveilled because people have heard about a murderer with a hook for a hand attacking people on Lovers Lane.

What this episode shows is that no one reads “studies” because if they did, they would see that the work is either discredited or redacted. The biggest pieces of “evidence” relied on self-reporting among parents who already had an issue with their children being trans. What’s upsetting is that this flimsy excuse for science can be used as the basis for enacting draconian reforms that make trans healthcare even harder to access.

What I’m Playing

I’ve been playing so many hours of these battle challenges in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth that I think I may have accidentally prepared myself to take on notoriously difficult games like Elden Ring and Bloodborne. That being said, I like that these battles in Rebirth are A) optional; and B) do not compromise the bulk of the gameplay. That being said, I feel like I’m getting close to completing the FF7R journey, which, for a game I got at the end of February, is certainly getting my money’s worth.